onster narratives help us share an experience of horror and
address our real anxieties, from wars and economic disasters, to
insane political situations, climatic ruin and other issues in the
news, according to David
Schmid, associate professor in the Department of English and
author of several books on the “monsters” living among
us, both real and imagined.

“Monster tales tell us the ‘truth’ about
things—evil is afoot, you can’t trust what you see, the
future is grim, you’re going to die. In a narrative, that
permits resolution or catharsis.”

Schmid says the concept of “monster” has been
used in many historical, geographical and ideological contexts to
dismiss and demonize that which is considered marginal, deviant and
abject.”

While the names and characteristics of specific monsters will
vary, their deviance is a given.

Schmid says monsters are not simply our opposites or exist
outside our homes and communities. In some cases,
“real” monsters arise and abide among us.

Americans’ fascination with Hannibal Lecter as a literary
and cinematic anti-hero led Schmid, who is British, to study serial
killers—a type of cultural monstrosity—and their place
in our cultural imagination.

He authored the critically acclaimed “Natural
Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture.”
Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are among the serial
killers who became iconic figures in America and are considered in
the book. Schmid also has written articles on noir novels, Dracula
and murderabilia. A book on murder culture is in progress.

“In my ongoing study of the monstrous, I never want to lose sight of the fact that the most distinctive monsters in any culture are the ones that we don’t immediately recognize.”

—David Schmid

“My aim at this point, however,” he says,
“is to use the limitations of symptomatic monsters to truly
rethink the monstrous itself.”

Schmid quotes film historian Kyle Bishop, who wrote that horror
films serve as barometers of such anxieties, and that zombie movies
in particular, which have proliferated since 9/11, “represent
the inescapable realities of unnatural death while presenting a
grim view of the modern apocalypse through scenes of deserted
streets, piles of corpses and gangs of vigilantes.”

Schmid says: “In my ongoing study of the monstrous, I
never want to lose sight of the fact that the most distinctive
monsters in any culture are the ones that we don’t
immediately recognize, those whose apparent normality makes them no
less destructive and murderous than their fictive counterparts: the
serial killer, the terrorist, the child murderer, the abusers of
Abu Ghraib, the banks that are destroying lives while reaping
record profits and the corporations that are poisoning the planet
to benefit their bottom line.”

ven before coming to UB as a doctoral student in American
studies, John
Edgar Browning had co-written a number of books and authored
many journal articles about vampires in general and Dracula figures
in particular.

Monsters, he says, are “cultural constructions of the
terrible that define what it is we subconsciously fear and what it
is we’re told to hate or love.” Definitions of the
monster, he adds, change over time and with each generation.

Browning’s research, including extensive field work in New
Orleans, has uncovered a subculture of “real” vampires,
people who drink blood or absorb what they call “psychic
energy.” There also are “real” donors who
voluntarily, and perhaps compulsively, supply the blood or energy
consumed.

Contemporary vampires may be sympathetic, or even figures of
humor or mockery. Take Sesame Street’s “The
Count,” who represents a variation on the cultural belief
that one way to disarm vampires is to make them count something
because they can’t stop counting.

“The vampire of today’s popular culture may or may
not inspire terror,” Browning says. “He or she may
provoke empathy or pathos, forcing us to recognize its monstrosity
as our own, to embrace what once we were taught to
loathe.”

Next summer, Browning will lecture on the Holland American
Lines’ vampire-themed cruise to Alaska, which will feature a
vampire movie festival and an appearance by Dacre Stoker,
great-grand nephew of “Dracula” author Bram Stoker.
Dacre wrote the official Stoker family-sanctioned sequel to
“Dracula” in 2009.

UB Research: Monster Culture

John Edgar Browning is a UB doctoral student in American
studies, part of the Division of Transnational Studies in the
College of Arts and Sciences. He spent nearly two years conducting
an ethnographic study of self-identified “vampires”
living in New Orleans, a project that has become the focal point of
his doctoral dissertation.

His work considers the historical literary roots of
supernatural visitation, terrifying visions, haunted houses and
man-made horrors not unlike the worst of what we read about online
or in the tabloid press today.

Take Maria de Zayas’ “Desengaños
amorosos” (“Disenchantments of Love,”
first published in 1647), in which a woman who has lost her honor
is sealed up in a wall by her own family in their house. They keep
her alive for six years until “her very flesh was eaten up to
the thighs with wounds and worms, which filled the stinking
place.”

Why do we love this material? Why do we keep
visiting or imagining the other side of our tranquil world?

“Doors that do not stay shut are among the most common
props in the theatrics of mass-consumed horror,” Castillo
notes. “The door ajar proves irresistibly dangerous; it
frightens us while simultaneously awakening our curiosity about the
lurking monsters that might inhabit the other side and their
‘excessive enjoyment.’”

These tales of mutilation, mutation, monstrosity, murder and
mayhem, Castillo adds, “offer a way for us to understand our
own modern fears and their monstrous offspring, and new ways to
think about broad questions of political history and relate them to
the modern age.”

he witch is a familiar cultural monstrosity. We dress up like
the critters on Halloween, cast films and television shows about
witches with cunning and attractive women, and refer to the
official stalking of the innocent as a “witch
hunt.” We sometimes despise and sometimes have sympathy
for the witch.

Phillips
Stevens Jr., associate professor of anthropology and a
noted scholar in his field, has published dozens of scholarly
articles on witchcraft, as well as on divination, distance healing,
zombies, rites of passage, magical thinking, religious thought and
the dark side of humanity.

He has a special interest in the evil witch—not to be
confused with modern pagans, like wiccans, who call themselves
witches and are emphatically not evil. Although associated with
pre-Christian Western culture, he says, the belief in witches
continues to exist in societies throughout the world.

He says more than a century of research leads anthropologists to
believe that, over eons of evolutionary development, a common
response to certain basic fears was useful to the development of
cohesive, cooperative societies.

“Shared fear is functional to the social order and in many
cultures it has become institutionalized,” he says. “In
the great majority of cultures throughout history and throughout
the world, the most terrible of human fears became embodied in one
terrible being: the witch.”

The evil witch, he adds, is the prototypical, nefarious
‘other,’ “the focus of the original conspiracy
theory. It causes whatever havoc it can in human society, from
individual misfortune to mass epidemic, to stealing children from
their beds and flying with them to meetings of witches, called the
‘sabbath’ in medieval European folklore.”

“In the great majority of cultures throughout history and throughout the world, the most terrible of human fears became embodied in one terrible being: the Witch.”

—Phillips Stevens

Cross-culturally, Stevens says, witches constitute the sum total
of negative social values, often killing their victims,
dismembering them, eating their flesh and drinking their
blood.

On the other hand, he notes that witches, like all cultural
monstrosities, also serve positive social functions.

“In pre-scientific cultures, they explain misfortune and
evil and disease and infant mortality,” he says. “They
unite people in opposition to the imagined ‘other’ and,
because in many societies witchcraft is believed to exist in people
without their knowledge, such beliefs persuade people to mind their
social manners, lest suspicion fall upon them.”